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Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Gritty Lessons and Pearls of Wisdom: Using Oral History Interviews to Draw Deep Insights from Past Action, Illuminate Heritage and Catalyse Learning
September 28, 2005

Gritty_Pearls1

Great Aunt Hetty's pearls. Not real pearls of course. But as "Sven-Erik Engh":http://www.historier.dk/ says, the mistake in organisations is to look for story-diamonds. Rather, look for enchanting pebbles and shells, polish them up a bit, use them for a while, then move on.

This is a ‘factional’ (factual in essence but dipped in fiction to protect the identity of our clients) correspondence between the authors during an oral history project for an international development institution celebrating its 40-year anniversary. Insights are drawn from a number of client assignments undertaken over the last 8 years that put story capture tools to work in the context of attempting to achieve broader strategic knowledge management objectives. In this case Victoria Ward – founder of Sparknow – was participating in the creation of a knowledge management strategy programme and acting as advisor to Stephanie Colton, who was project managing the experimental oral histories strand.